Chances are it's been a while, and there's a simple reason: technology means we hardly ever need to. With nine in 10 Australians carrying a smartphone in their pocket, skills that society once considered essential have become redundant.

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There are two ways of looking at this. One is that outsourcing the mundane tasks of day-to-day life has liberated our creativity and made the seemingly impossible possible. The other is that gadgets are eating our brains and making us foolishly dependent, as in the American tourist who last week took a six-hour detour through the Icelandic wilderness after incorrectly programming his GPS.

Baroness Susan Greenfield. Photo: Andrew Meares

There are persuasive advocates for either case. Prominent British neuroscientist Susan Greenfield, for instance, has long argued that technology is fundamentally altering our brains, and not always for the better. She worries about a world confined to two dimensions, where audiovisual entertainment delivered via screens becomes so prevalent that it leaves no time to develop other senses, and where our attention spans are so shattered by a torrent of information that we can no longer appreciate the beauty of a good story or enjoy a conversation.

"One of the things in common with what we're losing is they're all three-dimensional things," she says. "Whether it's reading a map or seeing a person's face or making a clay model, it's all the real world. What people tend to forget is the screen is not the real world. It's a two-dimensional representation, but it's not reality.

"If you spend a lot of time in this other place, then all the values and experiences that the real world has to offer will be denied you – smelling flowers, fine motor control, hopping, skipping and jumping, painting a picture. It ranges from fine motor skills – I don't know where we're going to find the next generation of surgeons from – to social skills like reading body language and all the benefits of bonding.

"What you have to work out is what you want from this technology. It can help you appreciate the real world more, enrich your life, save you routine tasks. Obviously it can be be a huge help, but in the context of the real world, not as an alternative."

On the other hand, influential Australian philosopher Dave Chalmers believes we have so thoroughly incorporated technology into our thinking processes that it can now be considered part of our brain – a concept dubbed the "extended mind".

The cyborg, part-man and part-machine, has long been a science fiction staple. But in Chalmers' view we've been on the road to becoming cyborgs since we first picked up a tool and expanded the capacities of our bodies and minds. Smartphones are now our personal hard drives, radically increasing memory and processing power. And if an invitation that would once have come in the post with a Melway reference now arrives via email with a link to Google maps, have we actually lost anything?

"Technology is increasing our capacities and providing us with newly sophisticated ways of thinking," Chalmers says. "In a way, it's automating work we used to have to do for ourselves painstakingly. It's taking stuff we had to do consciously and slowly and making it happen fast and automatically.

"There's two ways of looking at it – that the tools are now doing stuff that the mind used to, so your mind is doing less, or that tools are becoming part of your mind so your mind is doing more. As your tools become more and more closely coupled, they become part of us. Maybe the biological core is doing a little bit less, but the extended system is doing things that wouldn't have been possible."

Greenfield wonders if this process is actually working in reverse, turning people into second-rate computers ("You might have enhanced information-processing skills, but information isn't knowledge"), but for Chalmers it's a natural response to the world we live in.

"My phone is always with me, it's just one big system," he says. "The brain is opportunistic – it picks up whatever's going on around it and incorporates it. As the universe changes the skill set we need to deal with it changes. It's appropriate to develop as the world develops.

"The internet is always in reach, unless there's an earthquake or such. Once your tools let you down you're in trouble, but that's just the way with any technology. If the tech is reliably present, we're going to do pretty well. There haven't been a whole lot of retrogressions.

"As you develop some parts of yourself you're potentially not going to develop others but that's been happening for a long time. If you a drive a car you'll be a lot less physically fit, but you'll go a lot more places."

The brain is a resilient, adaptable beast.

Neuroscientist Penelope McNulty is a daily witness to the adaptability of the human brain. In her work with stroke patients she sees brains rewire themselves to cope with damage, and she has few doubts that technological change is pushing us in new directions.

"We know it's affecting people," she says. "For example, our memory is shorter and we remember smaller chunks of things. "Think of how many phone numbers you used to remember 20 years ago and how many you can remember now. We just don't need to any more, so we're changing the skills we have. We know how to find information much faster than we ever used to and we possibly have faster filters.

"We all know a lot more information about a lot more things than we used to, because we don't have to remember some of those other things like times tables."

Learning occurs when neurons set up networks that fire together, McNulty explains. The more you use a skill the more developed those networks are, until eventually it becomes automatic, changing from "something you think to something you do". Conversely, when you don't use a skill, the networks decay.

Not everyone is sanguine about the arts we are losing. The apparently terminal decline of handwriting, for instance, has caused angst in many quarters. (Chalmers misses it not at all: "The last time I wrote cursive I remember thinking 'thank god we don't need to do this any more'.") Some researchers, however, believe there is an essential link between the movement of the hand and the creation of thoughts and memories that typing simply cannot replicate, while others lament the rushed and impersonal nature of electronic communication.

Melbourne handwriting analyst Ingrid Seger-Woznicki is one of the latter. She sees the care and attention that went into writing legibly as a mark of respect between author and reader, and believes the discipline of writing made for clearer thinking.

"The lack of writing is reflective of our lack of clarity of communication," she says. "We don't see communication as an art as we used to. Writing by hand forces you to stop and think a bit, and it makes you more aware of how you affect others. Poor handwriting used to be seen as a lack of consideration.

"When you write cursive you are wanting to connect with people's minds at a deeper level, and as a society we don't want to do that any more."

The kids of today ... Plato was lamenting the impact of technology on the brain 2400 years ago. Photo: AP

This is anything but a new debate. Macquarie University-based philosopher Neil Levy refers to Phaedrus, Plato's tale of a king of a preliterate culture who is offered the gift of writing but refuses it, saying: "For this invention will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practise their memory ... You offer your pupils the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom, for they will read many things without instruction and will therefore seem to know many things, when they are for the most part ignorant and hard to get along with."

Leaving aside the irony of Plato using writing to rant against writing, it shows that the older generation has ever fretted about the younger generation's lack of education, morals and respect. Reassuringly, we don't seem to have bottomed out yet, and the flipside of a degraded memory is the ability to access knowledge at any time in almost any place.

"Plato was right in one way," Levy says. "Memory does get worse. Once you start writing things down you don't have to remember. But the benefits are in terms of capacity to think. I'm not a doomsday person. There will be losses, and there will be enormous gains."

The difference now is the speed of change. From one day to the next, technology enhances or replaces another human function. In one way it draws us further into Greenfield's two-dimensional existence, but in others it liberates our time and imagination.

So for every pensioner muttering about their barista's inability to add up the price of two coffees, there is a Millennial cursing a Baby Boomer's helplessness in the face of the app store. Neurons go to where the action is, and our brains are ruthlessly practical survival mechanisms, adapted to the needs of today and not much worried about the world that was or might be. Sentimental musings on what we have lost along the way, they leave to us.